An arctic wind cut across Prudhoe Bay, sending spindrifts swirling as Energy Secretary Chris Wright stepped onto a podium hastily erected among oil wells and pump stations. The gray summer sunlight scattered over ice-rimmed ponds, shadows gathering in the hollows of low heaves and stretching over the tundra. But the visitors gathered around him were less interested in the scenery than what lay beneath it.

Wearing a hard hat perched above a pair of safety glasses, Wright gripped a lectern with red-knuckled hands chilled by the cold air. “I want to say to all of you standing here today,” he told a gaggle of oil workers, “you are the greatest liberators in human history.”

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